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Introduction

PLAY TO WIN

It’s just after lunchtime on a Saturday in June. In the basement cafeteria of a public elementary school the smell of Doritos, doughnuts, pizza, and McDonald’s fries hangs in the air. Although there is a chess tournament in progress in the gym, less than fifty feet away, the atmosphere in the cafeteria is boisterous. Some children are entertaining themselves by running between the tables. Others, almost all boys, are engaged in rambunctious games of team chess, known as “bug house.”¹ A few kids sit apart, absorbed in playing their Game Boys. The youngest of the children are huddled at the back of the cafeteria, drawn to a table that has been set up near a wall of industrial-size, silver-colored refrigerators. Mesmerized, the kids stare at, and sometimes tentatively touch, the shiny gold trophies that cover the table’s surface. Together they try to count all the trophies—but some are too young to count high enough.

Their parents pass the time in their own ways. Groups of dads sit together, some talking, others gossiping about the event and the other children. Mothers sit by themselves or in pairs. One mom reads The Kite Runner, another labors over the Sunday Times crossword puzzle, and still another keeps an eye on her son while her knitting needles click rhythmically.

Close to half of the parents are not sitting, however. They are jockeying for position in front of two sets of doors that lead from the cafeteria into the gym, where the tournament is taking place. Those closest to the doors strain to see through the single, one-foot-square window in each door to get a glimpse of their child’s game board. Parents are banned from the tournament room because of poor behavior at previous tournaments: helping their children cheat, distracting other children, or even getting into fights with other parents. Some pass messages back to other parents—“He’s down a knight,” for instance—but most fret silently. Every so often a child exits the gym. As the doors swing open, they slam into the faces of parents who had been peering through the windows.

As soon as a child emerges, the interrogation begins. The first question is rarely “Did you win or lose?” A child’s body language usually makes the outcome of the match obvious. Instead parents ask, “What happened?” One girl answers simply, “I blundered my queen.” A boy launches into a blow-by-blow description of the game: “I put my knight on e6 and he put his pawn on f4 and . . .” Some parents, especially moms who generally know less about the fine points of chess, just praise their kids for their success or offer them comfort for their loss.

Within the din of this 140-player tournament, many languages can be heard, including English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic. One tournament participant is deaf. Not everyone in the overcrowded, noisy cafeteria is friendly. When a boy, no older than eight, asks a dad standing next to him if his section has been called to play the final round, the man replies tersely, “I don’t know. I don’t work here. Go ask someone over there,” as he gestures toward the trophy table, where tournament organizers are standing.

The youngest players, who are soon to graduate from preschool or kindergarten, finish their four games quickly. The tournament directors hold the awards ceremony for this group early in the afternoon. As the children sit down near the trophy-filled table they had been inspecting so closely earlier, their parents gather around, cameras at the ready. The tournament announcer explains that this section had seventeen competitors. Miraculously they have all tied for first place.

“Quite an achievement,” the announcer intones, deadpan, as the parents look at one another and laugh.

The children clap excitedly. This section is the only one in which all the players receive a trophy for participating. A father whose child is too old to compete in this group laments to another dad, “My son is going to explode if he doesn’t get a trophy.”

Another father, sitting in the back of the cafeteria with his wife (they are one of the few couples present), watches the youngest kids with a smile. His son is a second-grader who is already playing in the tournament’s most advanced section. This father and son seem to share a special bond, signified by their matching T-shirts emblazoned with characters from Toy Story and a tagline from the movie, “To Infinity and Beyond.” As his son prepares to play his last-round game, the man turns to me and declares, “I never would have thought I’d end up spending my weekends in a cafeteria basement, waiting around for my son!”

Why do so many families spend their weekends watching their children compete? To answer this question I present evidence from three case study activities (one academic, chess; one artistic, dance; and one athletic, soccer) drawn from sixteen months of fieldwork with ninety-five families who live around a major metropolitan area in the Northeast—including 172 separate interviews with parents, children, and teachers and coaches. I argue that the extensive time devoted to competition is driven by parents’ demand for credentials for their children, which they see as a necessary and often sufficient condition for entry into the upper-middle class and the “good life” that accompanies it. I develop the concept of “Competitive Kid Capital” to explore the ways in which winning has become central to the lives of American children.

TO INFINITY AND BEYOND?

The “To Infinity and Beyond” dad, Josh,² and his wife, Marla, are dermatologists in private practice. They work full time while raising eight-year-old Jeremiah in the center of Metro, a large city in the northeastern United States. Marla and Josh also have an older daughter who is a freshman at Duke University.

Jeremiah attends one of the best independent day schools in the country and has already distinguished himself outside of school. He is one of the top fifty chess players for his age in the country, and he plays on one of the most selective travel soccer teams in the city. Jeremiah also takes private piano lessons and a music theory class at the “top” local music instruction school.

Josh, who grew up outside of Pittsburgh, says that Jeremiah’s childhood is “totally different” from his own. “I never played in an outside-of-school sports thing,” he explained in a soft-spoken voice. “I didn’t play soccer, except pick-up games. I guess I played some neighborhood softball games. But I never did chess in an organized way, and I never did soccer in an organized way. My dad was never involved as a coach.” In contrast, Josh acts as an “assistant coach” for Jeremiah’s team, which like many travel teams, employs a paid non-parent head coach.

Both Marla and Josh are familiar faces at chess tournaments and on the sidelines of Jeremiah’s soccer games. Marla often sits perched in a chair, reading a book or socializing with other parents when they approach her. Josh is more gregarious among the chess parents from Jeremiah’s school. He thinks of most of these parents as a “pretty compatible and nice group” and told me, “I was imagining [starting] a book club because we sit around during these tournaments.”

Josh and Marla get a lot of plea sure out of hugging the sidelines while Jeremiah puts himself through the paces of these tournaments. “It’s a tag team thing,” Josh explains. “[We] both want to, if not hunger to, participate in his ups and downs.” Of course that’s often difficult to manage with work and family obligations and community and religious responsibilities. Marla describes how they handle the details of Jeremiah’s extracurricular life: “Things that Jeremiah does on Thursdays and Fridays, he does with our nanny. But Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, it’s Josh and I. Monday, Wednesday it’s me; Josh is Tuesday.”

Marla thinks that at this stage, Jeremiah should avoid specializing in any one activity. He should pursue chess, music, and soccer at the same time, even if that means hiring additional help for the family to manage the logistics. “I would not want, at this age, unless he were a prodigy of some sort, for the focus to be only on one of those things,” Marla says earnestly. “I mean he’s my son, I think he’s a great kid and he’s got a lot of talents, but he’s not a prodigy. At this point, he needs to develop all sorts of aspects of his interests.”

Josh articulates his parenting philosophy in a slightly different way, explaining that Jeremiah has “got lots of muscles and it’s exciting to think of him using them all and making the best of them.” Being well-rounded and benefiting from the exposure to many different activities, hence working different “muscles,” seems to his parents the right strategy for Jeremiah, especially since he is not the absolute best in any of them. Breadth muscles, and not just depth muscles, are necessary to reach infinity and beyond.

But Josh describes his son as primarily a “ball guy”: “Well, Jeremiah gravitates toward any round object. When he was younger he could maneuver a little round object, like dribble it, and to see that little toddling creature, that was amazing. . . . So it was clear that he was a ball guy.”

In conversation Josh highlighted Jeremiah’s soccer skills, likely because soccer draws them especially close together. But the attraction to soccer is more than this. When Josh talks about his son’s soccer career his voice deepens and his stance changes. He clenches his fist when he says “ball guy,” as the masculine image of athletics appears to especially appeal to him.

Given their “multiple-muscles” theory, it is not surprising that Josh and Marla have chosen activities to provide complementary skills for their son. “The team aspect in soccer is essential,” Josh notes. “People work together [on the field]. . . . And it’s not at all like that in chess because when you’re competing as a chess player, you’re not working with other teammates, you’re essentially working on your own.”

Marla listed a different set of skills she thinks Jeremiah derives from competitive chess: “Chess really helps with and reinforces the capacity to focus and concentrate. It’s also amazing in terms of what it imbues a child with—strategic thinking, advance planning, and awareness of consequences.”

Josh and Marla think that these skills—teamwork, focus, and strategic thinking—are of great value in adult life. Even though the biggest tournament of all, the college admissions process, is ten years off for Jeremiah, they think about it frequently. Jeremiah’s prospects are good, Josh reflects: “[Our daughter] got someplace good, so even more I feel like Jeremiah will get something good because he’s going to be a high achiever or an overachiever.”

“I’m realizing I have very high expectations for Jeremiah,” Marla adds. “I mean I’m his mom, but he’s really, really smart, and he excels at school.” She went on, “He’s very self-driven, and so I feel like that’s going to propel him through life and if he’s lucky, and remains well, I could imagine him pursuing college and then a graduate degree, and some kind of exceptional work in what ever career he chooses.”

They know just how competitive the world can be because Marla and Josh are the survivors of many tournaments themselves. “Well, I mean I’m a Baby Boomer kid,” Marla notes. “There’s just such a [huge] population. Then my kids are Baby Boom-lets, so there’s just a crunch of less resources and a lot of people. So that’s partly the reason for the competition.” She continued, “You know, as I got older there was always a sense that you’ve got to have a lot of stuff you’re doing, your extracurriculars were meant to be strong. But it just didn’t start as young.”

THE COMPETITIVENESS OF AMERICAN FAMILY LIFE

Why have competition and “extracurriculars” taken hold for such young children, and why are busy families, like Jeremiah’s, devoting so much time to them? Like the other middle- and upper-middle-class parents behind the swinging doors of the chess tournaments, Josh and Marla are affluent and educated, working full-time jobs while also shuttling their kids to tryouts for all-star teams, regional and national tournaments, and countless evening and weekend practices. Many of these families need to outsource to keep up—Marla and Josh have had a nanny for years—especially since they live far away from grandparents and other family members. Family meals take place on the go, in the backseat of moving cars, or not at all.³ As the parental “second shift” continues to grow,⁴ alongside it a second shift for children has emerged, which is suffused with competition rather than mere participation.

That American families are busy is not surprising. A book by a team of anthropologists, Busier Than Ever!, makes the case that American families, especially those with two working parents, have never before had so many obligations outside of the home.⁵ Time-use studies yield similar results, finding that parents work more hours outside of the home and children spend more time in organized settings than in previous American generations.⁶ More children than ever are also “hurried,” participating in three or more organized activities per week or in a single activity for four hours or more over two days.⁷

Ethnographic work on family life affirms this finding, documenting, in particular, middle-class families racing from work to children’s classes and practices to home, repeating this cycle day after day. Sociologist Julia Wrigley found that “children had no friends to play with in the neighborhood, because [the other] children were all off at classes.”⁸ Anthropologist Marjorie Goodwin explains, “Increasingly middle class parents are going to extraordinary lengths to foster their children’s talents through maintaining a hectic schedule of organized leisure activities.”⁹

But it’s not just that middle-class children spend their time in organized activities. What is critical, and rarely discussed, is the competitive nature of their extracurricular lives. The Tallingers, one of the case studies in Annette Lareau’s seminal work on childhood socialization that finds that class trumps race in terms of parenting strategies, had sons who were members of several travel and elite soccer teams.¹⁰ Lareau highlights the organized and interactive experiences middle-class parents construct for their children, such as constantly talking with them and encouraging them to question adults in a variety of institutional settings. She calls this parenting style “concerted cultivation.”

But little is made of this competitive element in Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods. She does not discuss the powerful presence of competition in children’s lives or the emphasis their parents place on acquiring a competitive spirit.¹¹ Playing to Win both updates Lareau’s findings and extends them, looking deeply at an important but previously unexamined component of concerted cultivation by examining one of the most intriguing examples of today’s intensive parenting: competitive after-school activities for elementary school–age children.

The popular media have certainly picked up on the increase in competition for young children, and the conflicts that often ensue. Recall the Disney Pixar movie The Incredibles and the media coverage of it, focused on deconstructing the line “Everyone’s special. . . . Which is another way of saying no one is,” along with numerous news stories on parents’ sometimes criminal misbehavior on the sidelines of kids’ sporting activities. But no one has systematically examined the structure, content, and potential consequences of competition, particularly for young children.

I argue that it is this organized, competitive element, outside of the home, that is key to understanding middle- and upper-middle-class family life. Parents worry that if their children do not participate in childhood tournaments they will fall behind in the tournament of life. While it’s not clear if the parents are correct, what matters is that they believe that they are and act accordingly. Their beliefs about the future shape their actions in the present when it comes to their children’s competitive after-school activities.

STUDYING KIDS AND COMPETITION

What exactly do I mean by “competitive childhood activities”? In Playing to Win competitive children’s activities are defined as organized activities run by adults, where records are kept and prizes are given out. There is a continuum of competitive experiences in childhood. For instance, sandbox play is at one extreme, on the left-hand side of the continuum. The activities featured in Playing to Win are to the right of center for sure. But they are not at the right-hand extreme, as these kids, for the most part, are not elites; in fact most of their parents explicitly don’t want their children to be “professionals” in chess, dance, or soccer.

Children’s competitive activities can be classified into one of the following types: athletic, artistic, or academic. My case studies consist of one of each: soccer, dance,¹² and chess. As one of the most popular youth team sports, with over 3 million children registered each year by U.S. Youth Soccer, soccer was a natural choice. Competitive dance has also grown by leaps and bounds, with competitive dance numbers estimated to be in the mid-six figures.¹³ Dance has experienced a resurgence since the rebirth of dance on television with such shows as So You Think You Can Dance (which highlights many “competition kids”) and Dancing with the Stars (with a few seasons featuring a “ballroom kids” competition). Finally, each winter and spring thousands of elementary school–age students sign up for the national chess championships, in addition to competing at local weekend tournaments. In the past decade scholastic membership in the United States Chess Federation (USCF) has nearly doubled in size, now accounting for a little more than half of all memberships, or about forty thousand kids.¹⁴

Each case study activity varies in the extent to which it emphasizes individual versus team competition. Soccer relies on a strong team structure, while dance develops a slightly weaker but identifiable team element, and chess involves the least amount of team competition. Chess and soccer are inherently competitive, meaning there is almost always a “winner” and a “loser” when a game is played, while dance is inherently expressive, so a competitive structure is imposed on the activity. Finally, the gender makeup of the cases varies. Soccer tends to have the same number of teams for both sexes by age group. Dance is dominated by girls, but there are some boys who participate. Chess, on the other hand, is dominated by boys, though there is a minority of girls as well.

For each activity I had two field sites: one urban, in and around Metro, and one suburban, in West County. Both chess sites—Metro Chess and West County Chess—have organizations that offer group classes, private lessons, chess camps, and regular chess tournaments; but Metro Chess is far more competitive, serious, and developed than West County Chess. The dance field sites, Metroville Elite Dance Academy and Westbrook Let’s Dance Studio, follow a similar pattern, as the Elite Dance Academy is in an urban setting and is much more competitive than the Let’s Dance Studio in the suburbs. Both offer classes, competition rehearsals, and group competition. Finally, the soccer field sites of Westfield Soccer Club and Metro Soccer Co-op offer a different picture, with the former being in a suburban location and highly competitive and the latter being in an urban setting with a greater emphasis on cooperation than competition. Both have nonprofit status and organize travel soccer teams that play in various regional soccer leagues and travel to regional and national tournaments.¹⁵

I engaged in six to nine months of intensive observation with each activity, talking informally with those involved, attending tournaments, and taking extensive field notes. During that time I conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with some of the parents, coaches, and children I met. I completed 172 interviews—ninety-five with parents, thirty-seven with children, and the rest with teachers, coaches, and administrators—to explore how competition shapes the lives of these contemporary American families.

As will be discussed, the group of families I met is diverse, though almost all belong to the broadly defined middle class. But variations exist within the middle class, particularly when it comes to education and income, as reflected in the Playing to Win families. On these measures the soccer parents are the most affluent, and the chess and soccer parents are the most educated. The dance parents are the most diverse group in terms of race/ethnicity (a little more than 50 percent are white), while the soccer parents I met are almost universally white (94 percent).

COMPETITION AND EDUCATIONAL CREDENTIALS IN THE UNITED STATES

America is frequently called a competitive country that focuses on achievement, as discussed in the preface. In this context achievement is often exemplified by the acquisition of credentials.¹⁶ The scholars Ran dall Collins and James English explain how this increasingly competitive environment has affected various realms in contemporary America—including the corporate world and the arts—as the focus on credentials becomes ever more dominant.¹⁷ In particular, as credentials grew ever more important throughout the twentieth century, the educational system became a screening system.

Max Weber, in some of his foundational work in sociology, argues that in a bureaucratic and hierarchical society, social prestige and status are based on credentials. As a consequence, performance on examinations and possession of degrees from particular institutions became centrally important.¹⁸ The need to perform well in school and to compete in order to secure a spot when only a limited number are available becomes a high priority. Parents, recognizing the need for their children to be prepared to acquire credentials, have grown to favor “a protected adolescence, curbing any turbulence or independence that might distract their sons [or daughters] from a steady preparation for success.”¹⁹

Credentialing tournaments were once limited to adolescence and high school. Outside the classroom, students entered athletic contests, joined debate teams, built “careers” as high school newspaper editors, and in hundreds of other ways sought to distinguish themselves in adolescence.

But today it would seem that for millions of middle-class, twenty-first-century American children, waiting until high school to prove one’s mettle is a mistake because the credentials bottlenecks these kids will face require much more advanced preparation.

Even the preschool set is busily trying to stand out from the crowd.²⁰ Journalist and editor Pamela Paul explains, “Entry into a high-quality preschool (and thereby, the theory goes, a good elementary school, high school, and college) has become cutthroat.”²¹ In 2011 one mother sued a preschool for destroying her four-year-old daughter’s chances at an Ivy League education.²² While the suit was widely ridiculed, its existence illustrates the extreme parental anxiety that exists today, especially in upper-middle-class communities.

It is tempting to denounce these behaviors and preoccupations as the hyperfixations of neurotic parents who are living through their children. Many pundits are not hesitant to invoke analyses that are just shy of pathology. These parents are labeled “helicopter parents” who hover over their kids from infancy through college graduation, even until children secure employment after college.²³

Are these parents crazy? Have they lost their grip? No. Their children face very real gates and gatekeepers through which they need to pass if they are going to achieve in ways similar to their parents. And the probability of that outcome appears to their parents—with good reason given the economic crises of the first decade of the twenty-first century—to be less than it once was. Demographics only heighten this demand, which has spiked in areas where there have been “baby boom-lets,” such as the Northeast.²⁴

Parental concern over future academic options for their children may seem absurd since Baby Boomers and their children, the Echo Boomers, are thus far the best-educated and wealthiest generations ever seen in the United States. But Baby Boomers faced unusual levels of competition for scarce educational resources due both to their numbers and their coming of age when women first entered college in a significant way.²⁵ Hence the cultural experience of competition, of an insufficient supply of spots for the size of the group seeking them, has predisposed these Boomers to see life as a series of contests,²⁶ as Marla explained.

Pamela Druckerman, in her headline-making book claiming that the French raise their children better than Americans do, attributes part of the stress of American parents to changes that started in the 1980s linked to developing in e quality: “Around the same period, the gap between rich and poor Americans began getting much wider. Suddenly, it seemed that parents needed to groom their children to join the new elite. Exposing kids to the right stuff early on—and perhaps ahead of other children the same age—started to seem more urgent.”²⁷

Also, because the Echo Boom is large and has a higher rate of college attendance than ever before, that particular competitive landscape is even more crowded. Popular press coverage of the low college acceptance rates, lower than ever of late at elite private and public universities,²⁸ only fuels parents’ anxiety, buttressing existing anxiety over credentials, and hence contributing to an even more competitive childhood culture. Recent books, such as Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid into College and The Neurotic Parent’s Guide to College Admissions, capture parental feelings about the college admissions process.²⁹

MOTIVATION FOR AN EARLY START IN THE COLLEGE ADMISSIONS RACE

Parents are working early on to ensure their children get into good colleges and pursue advanced degrees. College is especially important in the United States, where it plays “a pivotal role in shaping future class destinations.”³⁰ The degree of instability that has become an unwelcome staple in the lives of millions of educated, professional workers has reinforced the importance of educational prestige as perhaps the only protection, dicey as it may be, against future family downward mobility.³¹ Most middle- and upper-middle-class families no longer pass on the family firm, so the ability to boost the succeeding generation into a better, or even the same, class is largely dependent on the next generation’s credentialing success.

Middle- and upper-middle-class parents are willing to invest large sums of money and time to make this a reality. In her work on the upper-middle class, Michèle Lamont explains that most “American upper-middle class men spend a considerable part of their life savings for the education of their children.”³² Families are willing to make such a large investment because higher education is at the heart of social reproduction.

But that money is not only spent on tuition. Parents are savvier than ever, investing both time and money so that their children get specialized instruction outside of the classroom.³³ For many kids, extracurricular life is focused on athletics and other organized games. And those extracurricular activities, specifically sports, can offer an admissions boost, particularly at the most elite colleges and universities.³⁴ Even though this boost is far from guaranteed, parents are willing to hedge their bets.

Participation in competitive activities is especially appealing in honing skills that will matter in the more weighty tournaments to come, because these proving grounds look like recreation. While parents in many Asian countries encourage their kids to spend countless hours hitting the books in English schools abroad or in cram schools at home,³⁵ many American parents prefer to shroud the honing process in activities that can be—and are generally experienced as—fun. It is crucial to the American ethos of competition that it should not look too much like work, especially for children, even if the competitive experience clearly has work-like elements.³⁶

At the same time it would be a mistake to think that parents of kids as young as Jeremiah fixate on specific college admissions offices every Saturday out on the soccer field. Instead they understand the grooming of their child as producing a certain kind of character and a track record of success in the more proximate tournaments of sports or dance or chess.

But were parents to think in directly instrumental terms about that thick admissions envelope, they would not be far off the mark. Activity participation, particularly athletics, does indeed confer an admissions advantage, through either athletic scholarships or an admissions “boost,” giving students an edge when applying to elite schools.³⁷

A 2005 New York Times article on the growing popularity of lacrosse explained, “Families see lacrosse as an opportunity for their sons and daughters to shine in the equally competitive arenas of college admissions and athletic scholarships.”³⁸ One parent is quoted in the article saying, “From what I hear on the coaches’ side in Division III [lacrosse participation is] worth a couple hundred points on the SAT.” (Participation in sports like lacrosse also provides a social class signifier in an era of needs-blind admissions.)

All of the Playing to Win parents were realistic about their children’s very slim chances of earning an NCAA scholarship, especially to a Division I school.³⁹ Instead what the parents I met are looking for is what lacrosse is thought to provide: an admissions boost. This boost is strongest at Ivy League schools, where students are not awarded athletic scholarships, and at top liberal arts colleges, where sometimes more than half of the smaller student bodies are collegiate athletes.

Higher education admissions systems are certainly “tied to Little League and high school sports and [are] related as well to the shared sports values of our national culture.”⁴⁰ While we don’t know with certainty that it is these specific activities that help children succeed in the college admissions race and beyond—because kids were not randomly assigned to competitive after-school activities—what matters is that parents believe participation in these activities is crucial and act accordingly while their children are still young.

That U.S. colleges and universities consider admissions categories other than academic merit is rooted in history and is uniquely American. Jerome Karabel shows how the “Big Three” of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale developed new admissions criteria in the 1920s to keep out “undesirables,” namely Jews and immigrants.⁴¹ This new system valued the “all-around man,” who was naturally involved in clubs and athletics. Karabel explains that the definition of admissions merit has continued to shift over time, and parents’ concern with college admissions for their children is “not irrational, especially in a society in which the acquisition of educational credentials has taken its place alongside the direct inheritance of property as a major vehicle for the transmission of privilege from parent to child. And as the gap between winners and losers in American grows ever wider—as it has since the early 1970s—the desire to gain every possible edge has only grown stronger.”⁴²

While researching Playing to Win I met one father, who actually did not attend college himself, and he told me about his motivation for his third-grade daughter’s participation in competitive chess: “Well, if this helps her get into Harvard . . .” Another mother said that her son’s achievements “might help him stand out and get into a good school.” When I asked her to define a “good school” she replied, “Ivy League or equivalent, like Stanford”—though she had not attended any of these colleges.

While these parents had not attended the schools they were interested in for their children, that was not true for all the families I met. Karabel and the journalist Daniel Golden do find that at many institutions legacy status is powerful; Golden finds this to be especially true at the University of Notre Dame.⁴³

We cannot know for sure that the way these affluent kids spend free time in their childhood will lead to their admission to these schools, which in turn will help maintain a class advantage. But we can say that the skills they acquire by participating in competitive childhood activities are certainly correlated.

In a society where a bachelor’s degree has become common, and in many circles is expected, the institution at which a degree was earned becomes a distinguishing feature,⁴⁴ and many parents correctly believe these activities can help gain entry to more elite institutions. According to sociologist Mitchell Stevens, in his study of college admissions at an elite, private liberal arts college, “Families fashion an entire way of life organized around the production of measurable virtue in children.”⁴⁵ Efforts to create this quantifiable virtue in children have led to the creation of a second shift for kids, which in turn has created what I call Competitive Kid Capital.

OVERCOMING CREDENTIALS BOTTLENECKS: THE ACQUISITION OF COMPETITIVE KID CAPITAL

Whenever children participate in activities, including unsupervised play or organized noncompetitive activities, they acquire skills through socialization.⁴⁶ This is also true of participation in organized activities that do not have an explicitly competitive element, as I have argued elsewhere.⁴⁷ But many activities that were previously noncompetitive have been transformed from environments that emphasized only learning skills, personal growth, and simple fun into competitive cauldrons in which only a few succeed: those who learn the skills necessary to compete and to win. Kids learn particular lessons from participation in competitive activities apart from normal childhood play.

There are two avenues by which parents think competitive activities can help children gain an edge: the specialist and the generalist avenues. Both pathways aid families in dealing with credentials bottlenecks because they help kids acquire skills and focus their time and energy. Parents think these activities help kids develop the kind of character that will be critical to success in the competitions that colleges, graduate schools, and employers pay attention to when making decisions.

The “specialist” avenue to the top has children competing to achieve national championships or awards for exceptional achievement. But this avenue requires specialization at an early age, professional coaching, high levels of raw talent, and substantial family resources, so only a few children can realistically pursue this path.

The “generalist” avenue is more common; it focuses on cultivating children into the all-around student who works “different muscles,” as Jeremiah’s parents put it. Generalist parents want their child to succeed in a variety of competitive endeavors, even though their child may not be the top competitor in one activity. Parents like Marla and Josh highlight particular skills that they think their children learn from participation in competitive activities, such as good sportsmanship, discipline and focus, and how to follow a schedule.

Often these generalist children try different activities in their youth, acquiring various skills from each before moving on to the next one, unless the kids really distinguish themselves in a particular activity and stick with it longer. As children get older there is often a transition from being a generalist to being a specialist, as the focus shifts from being well-rounded to attaining a special achievement, usually around high school.

Drawing upon Bourdieu’s work on both cultural capital (defined as proficiency and familiarity with dominant practices, particularly with respect to adeptness in the educational system) and the habitus (defined as a system of dispositions that manifests in various types of taste, such as speech and dressing),⁴⁸ I label the lessons and skills that parents hope their children gain from participating in competitive activities “Competitive Kid Capital.” The character associated with this Competitive Kid Capital that parents want their children to develop is based on the acquisition of five skills and lessons, which emerged in conversations with parents: (1) internalizing the importance of winning, (2) bouncing back from a loss to win in the future, (3) learning how to perform within time limits, (4) learning how to succeed in stressful situations, and (5) being able to perform under the gaze of others.

Internalizing the importance of winning is a primary goal in acquiring Competitive Kid Capital. One parent told me, “I think it’s important for him to understand that [being competitive] is not going to just apply here, it’s going to apply for the rest of his life. It’s going to apply when he keeps growing up and he’s playing sports, when he’s competing for school admissions, for a job, for the next whatever.”

Competitive children’s activities reinforce winning, often at the expense of anything else, by awarding trophies and other prizes. Such an attitude appears to help bring success in winner-take-all settings like the school system and some labor markets.⁴⁹ Though many activities do award participation trophies, especially to younger children, the focus remains on who wins the biggest trophy and the most important title.

Linked to learning the importance of victory is learning from a loss to win in the future, another component of Competitive Kid Capital. This skill involves perseverance and focus; the emphasis is on how to bounce back from a loss to win the next time. A mom explained, “The winning and losing is phenomenal. I wish it was something that I learned because life is really bumpy. You’re not going to win all the time and you have to be able to reach inside and come back. Come back and start fresh and they are able to. I’m not saying he doesn’t cry once in a while. But it’s really such a fantastic skill.”

Because competitive activities belong to organizations that keep records, the stakes are higher than in recreational leagues, and children can see that it matters that there is a record of success. These childhood competitive activities can also help kids learn how to recover from public failures and how to apply themselves and work hard in order to be long-term winners. Kids learn the identity of being a winner only by suffering a loss. This father summarizes the sentiment, trying to raise a son to be a winner in life:

This is what I’m trying to get him to see: that he’s not going to always win. And then from a competitive point of view, with him it’s like I want him to see that life is, in certain circumstances, about winning and losing. And do you want to be a winner or do you want to be a loser? You want to be a winner! There’s a certain lifestyle that you have to lead to be a winner, and it requires this, this, this and this. And if you do this, this, this and this, more than likely you’ll have a successful outcome.

Learning how to succeed given time limits is a critical skill as well—one of the “this” things you have to do to be a winner—and a critical component of Competitive Kid Capital. There are time limits for games, tournaments, and routines, and the competition schedule is also demanding, cramming many events into a weekend or short week. On top of that children need to learn how to manage their own schedules, which they might have to do someday as busy consultants and CEOs. One boy revealed how busy his young life is when he told me what soccer teaches him: “Dodging everything—like when we have to catch a train, and there are only a few more minutes, we have to run and dodge everyone. So, soccer teaches that.”

Children also learn how to perform and compete in environments that require adaptation, a fourth ingredient in the Competitive Kid Capital recipe. These environments may be louder, more distracting, colder, hotter, larger, or smaller than anticipated in preparations, but competitors, and especially winners, learn how to adapt. The adaptation requires focus on the part of children—to focus only on their performance and eventual success. The following quote by a mom of a fourth-grader links this to performing well on standardized tests:

It’s that ability to keep your concentration focused, while there’s stuff going on around you. As you go into older age groups, where people are coming in and out, the ability to maintain that concentration, a connection with what’s going on, on the board in front of you, and still be functional in a room of people, it’s a big thing. I mean to see those large tournaments, in the convention centers, I know it is hard. I did that to take the bar exam, and the LSAT I took for law school, and GREs. You do that in a large setting, but some people are thrown by that, just by being in such a setting. Well that’s a skill, and it’s a skill and it’s an ability to transfer that skill. It’s not just a chess skill. It’s a coping-with-your-environment skill.

Finally, in this pressure-filled competitive environment children’s performances are judged and assessed in a very public setting by strangers—the final component to Competitive Kid Capital. This dance mom explains:

I think it definitely teaches you awareness of your body and gives you a definite different stance and confidence that you wouldn’t have. For example, you’re told to stand a certain way in ballet, which definitely helps down the road. When she has to go to a job interview, she’s going to stand up straight because she’s got ballet training; she’s not going to hunch and she’s going to have her chin up and have a more confident appearance. The fact that it is not easy to get up on a stage and perform in front of hundreds or thousands of people, strangers, and to know that you’re being judged besides, definitely gives you a level of self-confidence that can be taken to other areas so again if she has to be judged by a teacher or when she’s applying for a job she’ll have more of that confidence, which helps you focus.

Children are ranked, both in relation to others’ performance in a particular competition and in relation to participants their age. These appraisals are public and often face-to-face, as opposed to standardized tests which take place anonymously and privately. Being able to perform under the gaze of others toughens children to shield their feelings of disappointment or elation, to present themselves as competent and confident competitors.

While all of the parents I met believe their children need to develop this Competitive Kid Capital to succeed later in life, most were also concerned that their kids lack free time to play or to “just be kids.” What is remarkable is that despite sometimes deep ambivalence, families keep their children involved in competitive activities. Even when the specific activity may change (for example, a child leaves soccer for lacrosse, or gymnastics for dance), children I met remain actively engaged in competition and in their second-shift activities after school. Their parents want to ensure they are giving their young children every possible opportunity to succeed in the future, in an often unpredictable world, by encouraging them to acquire and stockpile Competitive Kid Capital.

A PREVIEW OF THE COMPETITION

The following six chapters further contextualize how and why parents want their children to acquire Competitive Kid Capital by analyzing the roots and perceived benefits of participation in competitive children’s activities. Each chapter answers some overarching questions: Why have these competitive activities developed over time? How is the competition structured now, and in each research site? Why do parents believe these competitive activities and Competitive Kid Capital to be so important in their children’s lives? How do parents make decisions about the specific competitive activities for their children? In what ways is there an industry behind these organized competitive activities? What do the children think about their participation in these competitive activities?

Chapter 1 is a historical analysis of competitive activities for American children. Here I ask: What are the social forces that have shaped the evolution of children’s competitive activities from roughly the turn of the twentieth century up to the present? I show that organized, competitive children’s activities developed for elementary school–age kids but then became more prevalent among middle-class children than among their lower-class counterparts due to major changes in three social institutions: the family, the educational system, and the organization of competition and prizes in the United States. I trace the history of the development of competitive children’s activities in general and then offer a brief history of competitive chess, dance, and soccer.

Chapter 2 describes the contemporary structure of these activities and my field sites, drawing on mixed methods and triangulated data from fieldwork observations, adult interviews, and child interviews. Chapter 3 turns to the parents themselves, presenting descriptive data on the parents I studied in each activity and analyzing the beliefs that motivate the parents to enroll their children in these activities. We see striking similarities among all the parents, mainly in their narratives about how their children got started in their particular activities and the ways they talk about the benefits they think their children acquire through participation. Their narratives are well-developed, suggesting a shared worldview about the future by both generalist and specialist parents. The components of Competitive Kid Capital that parents want their children to acquire are described in detail in this chapter.

Chapter 4 turns to the differences that demarcate chess, dance, and soccer, particularly when it comes to gender. For example, why do some parents strategically select soccer rather than dance for their daughters? I argue that divergent gender scripts explain the pathways parents are choosing for their kids. Parents of dancers have more traditional gender ideas, emphasizing gracefulness and appearance, while soccer parents with daughters want to raise aggressive, or “alpha,”⁵⁰ girls. I make the case that this distinction reveals forms of classed femininity, one of the most provocative arguments in Playing to Win. As the soccer parents can largely be thought of as upper-middle class and the dance parents as middle and lower-middle class, this shows an emerging gender divide within the middle class around aspirations for girls.

Chapter 5 delves deeper into the organizational context that surrounds parental decision making. Many of the parenting practices I observed are embedded in institutions, and these institutions offer a critical mediating level between individual choice and societal “culture.” I argue that there is a world of competitive childhood, designed to maximize acquisition of Competitive Kid Capital—and ordered to make money off parents who are focused on its acquisition. I discuss similarities in the way the activities are organized, including the reward structures, organization of competitions, selection processes, and conflicts among competitive children’s activities. I also identify processes such as the “carving up of honor” and the “problem of the high-achieving child.” Understanding that there is a business world organized to convince parents of the benefits of competitive kids’ activities helps us better contextualize parents’ motivations. They no longer get information just from other parents at the school bus stop.

Chapter 6 places the attention on those kids at the bus stop by investigating their own daily lives and beliefs. What do they think about their participation in competitive activities, and in what ways do their conceptions differ from adults’? Children have definite views about their activities. This raises the question of whether children are actually acquiring the Competitive Kid Capital that their parents want them to have or are learning different kinds of skills and lessons, some of which may be unintended, such as being more social and cooperative than focused on winning at all costs. I highlight three main themes that consistently emerged from interactions with children: dealing with nerves and mistakes while being judged, comparing individual versus team success, and the role that trophies, ribbons, and other material rewards play in children’s continued participation in these competitive activities. Over- all kids find their participation in these competitive activities fun, even as they work hard to acquire the Competitive Kid Capital their parents want them to have, along with a few other lessons along the way. Children’s own quite strong and divisive ideas about gender are also discussed.

Combined with a conclusion and an appendix, these six chapters represent a contribution to a cultural sociology of in e quality by studying the daily lives of mostly middle-class American families as the parents work to develop the Competitive Kid Capital that they think will help guarantee their children’s future success (note that the diversity of the middle class is represented here with some families falling in the upper-middle class, defined as having at least one parent who has earned an advanced postgraduate degree and is working in a professional or managerial occupation and both parents having earned a four-year college degree, and lower-middle-class families, defined as only one parent having a college degree and/or neither parent working in a professional or managerial occupation). Though only a snapshot, the intensity of what we see here reveals the outlines of a major feature of childhood today and illustrates the ways competition is now a central aspect of American childhood, showing that countless boys and girls no longer simply play—they play to win.